4 ms·

IMO the main reason a YouTube competitor fails to spawn is bandwidth costs and lack of advertisers making it immediately really unprofitable.

bogwog 7y ago
Have you researched this, or are you making assumptions? Hosting videos is pretty cheap, and while getting the same amount of traffic as Youtube would get very costly very fast, it could also be very profitable if monetization is done right. Plus technologies like PeerTube can significantly reduce bandwidth expenses if that's really an issue. Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly, but a competitor with a different business model definitely could make it work for them.
- icebraining 7y ago
  > Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly They don't need to, they have caching servers on most ISP's internal networks. Popular stuff (that consumes most bandwidth) just needs to be sent once from the mothership.
MaxBarraclough 7y ago
Bandwidth isn't really the problem. Vimeo exists, and they serve considerably higher bitrates than YouTube. The problem is that YouTube is entrenched, and has network effects on its side. A fresh new competitor to YouTube would face a combination of a lack of advertisers, and a lack of content seeking ad-funding. On the other hand, when it comes to pay-to-watch content, there's space in the market for new competitors to arise, as the network effects are less significant there. https://rakuten.tv/ https://rakuten.tv/ and https://chili.com/ https://chili.com/ for instance, are far smaller than Amazon and Google. I guess bandwidth costs are, in a sense, the problem. If if were easy to run a very-large-scale video-hosting site, that would help, sure. Ads wouldn't have to be worth much to make the business work. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market

bogwog 7y ago

Have you researched this, or are you making assumptions? Hosting videos is pretty cheap, and while getting the same amount of traffic as Youtube would get very costly very fast, it could also be very profitable if monetization is done right. Plus technologies like PeerTube can significantly reduce bandwidth expenses if that's really an issue. Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly, but a competitor with a different business model definitely could make it work for them.

icebraining 7y ago
> Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly They don't need to, they have caching servers on most ISP's internal networks. Popular stuff (that consumes most bandwidth) just needs to be sent once from the mothership.

MaxBarraclough 7y ago

Bandwidth isn't really the problem. Vimeo exists, and they serve considerably higher bitrates than YouTube. The problem is that YouTube is entrenched, and has network effects on its side. A fresh new competitor to YouTube would face a combination of a lack of advertisers, and a lack of content seeking ad-funding. On the other hand, when it comes to pay-to-watch content, there's space in the market for new competitors to arise, as the network effects are less significant there. https://rakuten.tv/ https://rakuten.tv/ and https://chili.com/ https://chili.com/ for instance, are far smaller than Amazon and Google. I guess bandwidth costs are, in a sense, the problem. If if were easy to run a very-large-scale video-hosting site, that would help, sure. Ads wouldn't have to be worth much to make the business work. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market